A Year in Reading: Karen Joy Fowler

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I’ve been looking forward to the publication of Molly Gloss’s wonderful Falling From Horses ever since I read the galley some months back, and this month it has finally arrived. While I waited, I returned to some of Gloss’s earlier novels – The Dazzle of Day and Wild Life, in particular. Although her more recent The Hearts of Horses was widely read, Gloss remains an author who has never gotten her full due. I have often wondered if any part of this is because she is so firmly a writer of the American West, so clearly, even when writing fantasy or science fiction, a reader of Westerns. When I read Gloss, I notice how seldom other novelists handle work — physical labor — in their books simply because she does this so routinely and so well.

She is surely one of the most thoughtful and most nuanced writers to rise from that tradition, always operating both on the level of the physical — landscape, work, the wild — but also cognizant of the mythical and problematic hold of the frontier on the American imagination. In Falling From Horses both of these are explicitly addressed — much of the novel takes place in Los Angeles during the making of the early Hollywood Westerns — and seldom has the reality and the dream been so smartly and effectively combined.

I suspect that few writers would survive the back-to-back reading of their works as well as Molly Gloss does. Her prose is meticulous, her characters distinct, her plotting unforced, her stories simultaneously iconic and completely natural in tone and incident. I usually cry at some point while reading them — that’s just an added bonus.

Andre Agassi’s 2009 memoir, Open, wasn’t necessarily the best book I read this year -- Joshua Ferris’The Unnamed would probably claim that title -- but it was the most memorable, partly for the wrong reason.
For close to 400 pages, Agassi tells of his harrowing childhood, his hatred of tennis, his dreary marriage to Brooke Shields, and his devotion to his trainer, Gil Reyes, and his current wife, Steffi Graf. His matches and insecurities are detailed in a roiling, visceral style, and Open chugs along as if Agassi’s true peers are Hamill and Halberstam, not Sampras and Courier. There are flaws here, to be sure, but they have more to do with Agassi himself than his authorial potency. As I read, I kept flipping to the title page in search of a ghostwriting credit. There was none, and I was flabbergasted. In addition to being a legendary athlete, Agassi was also a hugely talented writer. Some guys have all the luck.
When I finished, though, I found the truth in the Acknowledgments: “This book would not exist without my friend J.R. Moehringer,” Agassi writes. This is an understatement: Moehringer -- Pulitzer-Prize winner and author of The Tender Bar -- pretty much wrote it himself. Though Agassi writes that Moehringer “felt ... that only one name belonged on the cover,” I felt utterly rabbit-punched. It was the only book I’ve ever read that betrayed me in such a way -- like finding that your cousin’s hilarious web video was directed by Adam McKay.
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At the risk of telling American readers something they already know all about, Fox Butterfield’sAll God’s Children: The Bosket Family and the American Tradition of Violence is brilliant and devastating. First published in 1995 (and reissued by Vintage in 2008 ), it begins with Butterfield's reporting on a young prison inmate, Willie Bosket, who, in 1988, was tried for stabbing a prison guard. Bosket had committed a double murder when he was fifteen, and as Butterfield delves into his history he discovers that Bosket’s father had also been convicted for a double murder. And so he looks back at the lives of generations of the Bosket family, right back to emancipation, the Civil War, and slavery.
In Britain these days "respect" is the most debased word in the English language; each year numerous murders result from the notion that the perpetrators had been treated with insufficient respect by someone whom they promptly stabbed. The same thing has been going on in America where, I'm guessing, the verb "to diss" originated. Butterfield convincingly traces this ghettoized idea of respect to the white southern "honor" code - itself imported from the European aristocracy - which demanded satisfaction (in the form of duels) in the face of any slight. The narrative of this investigative genealogy is valuable in itself (even if there are moments when Butterfield seems in danger of being swayed by his own rhetoric) but it’s the close-up story of Willie and his father that makes the book so compelling: the constant, cliffhanging hope of the possibility of redemption matched by the attendant fear of something ever more dreadful about to be unleashed.
More from A Year in Reading 2011Don't miss:A Year in Reading 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005The good stuff:The Millions' Notable articlesThe motherlode:The Millions' Books and ReviewsLike what you see?Learn about 5 insanely easy ways to Support The Millions, The Millions on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr.